The Pegida march through Dresden on Monday.
Photograph: Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters

With her shiny evening heels clicking on the cobbles, Steffi Klein stops to take in the view of crowds gathering just metres away on Theaterplatz in Dresden.

She and her partner, Frank, both dressed up for an evening at the opera, take it in turns to share a pair of opera glasses to read some of the banners the protesters are holding aloft. The couple tut under their breaths and she rolls her eyes.

“My daughter wanted us to babysit our grandchildren so she could go to that,” says the 59-year-old. “I said: ‘You must be joking, my darling. I’m going to the opera, not to that nonsense.’”

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On stage at the Semperoper is Albert Lortzing’s comic opera Der Wildschütz (The Poacher), in which a man almost loses his betrothed as punishment for poaching until it transpires the roebuck he had killed was in fact a donkey.

Colourful banners hang between masts at the front of the baroque opera house, reading “Open your eyes”, “open your hearts” and “The dignity of humans is sacrosanct” – quoting article 1 of the German constitution. A large white LED screen hanging at the front of the elegant building flashes the message “We’re not a backdrop for intolerance”.

The square in front of the opera house is being used as a stage for the weekly Monday rally of the anti-immigrant campaign group Pegida, which is meeting here for the 37th time.

“They do their thing, we do ours,” says Joachim Schneider, pointing at the Semperoper. “We’re proud of that house, just as we are of a lot of Dresden’s cultural treasures,” the 62-year-old unemployed computer scientist says, fondly recalling the days when he could buy an opera tickets for just 17 East German marks. “But they’ve not endeared themselves to us by coming up with slogans like that, or letting migrants sleep in tents in front of the theatre.” The LED screen has switched its message to “We’re not a stage set for xenophobia”.

“The fact is,” Schneider says, “this is the only place I have to go – no one else represents my frustrations better than Pegida does.” He thinks this is about his 20th rally.

On stage is Lutz Bachmann, Pegida’s founder and leader, and his sidekick, riesling vintner Siegfried Daebritz. Bachmann fires up the crowd with the latest statistics about the large numbers of refugees arriving in Germany, raising the loudest response when he talks of the number of people whose asylum claims have been turned down. He says they have avoided deportation and are now “roaming free”.

When he tells his audience that a hotel, the Prinz Eugen, was bought by the city council on Monday for €3m (£2.16m) to house refugees, the crowd responds with loud jeers. “I tell you, it won’t be long before that burns,” Schneider says, quickly adding he does not condone arson.

In front of him two young men with shaven heads, one of whom wears a hoodie bearing the phrase “Dresden, my neighbourhood” in gothic script, are also heard to mutter “that’ll soon be in flames”.

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The rally, attended by an estimated 10,000 people, takes place at a time of heightened tension across Germany, when virtually every town and community is gripped by the question of how to house its share of the refugees that have been arriving in their thousands every day, with no sign of a let-up.

Pegida started as a small protest group in October 2014 and grew to 30,000. But in the summer its size shrank to a negligible few hundred disgruntled souls and was considered by most to be on its way out. Many supporters were said to have been put off by Facebook images of Bachmann posing as Hitler that went viral. But in recent weeks the movement has been given a fresh lift by the refugee crisis, not least by the uncertainty and fears as to how it might develop.

To some extent the concerns of those gathered in the square are little different to those heard elsewhere in Germany – namely how many people are still to arrive and how they are to be housed and integrated. Neither do Pegida’s demands – among them the suspension of Schengen agreement and a freeze on the admission of asylum seekers – seem out of step with the public discourse at a time when estimates say between 1 million and 1.5 million refugees are expected by the end of December.

But it is the hate with which most “pegistas” – as they’ve been nicknamed, or “patriots” as Bachmann prefers to call them – are brimming that is the standout factor. That and their strong, almost overpowering, sense of victimhood.

The wrath at Pegida rallies is reserved almost exclusively for Angela Merkel, who is repeatedly referred to as a “traitor of the people”. The German chancellor – whom many hold responsible for the crisis, namely for her “open door” policy towards asylum claims – is depicted as everything from a euro dictator, dressed in a Nazi-style uniform with red arm bands showing euro signs instead of swastikas, to a state security informant called Erica.

In between speeches the crowds chant “Merkel raus!” (Merkel out), “Widerstand” (resistance) and “Wir sind das Volk” (We are the people) – a rallying cry stolen from the 1989 dissident protests that were crucial in bringing down the Berlin Wall. Alongside German flags, scores are waving what under the bright lights initially looks like the Norwegian flag but is the black, red and gold cross emblem of the Nazi resistance movement led by Claus von Stauffenberg – who was executed after his failed attempt to assassinate Hitler on 20 July 1944.

“We are resistance fighters like him,” an elderly woman trying to push a bike through the crowds says. “We have hardly ever been so vulnerable in our history as we are now, with the borders open and everyone and anyone, including suicide bombers and economic freeloaders, pouring in.” Like many here, she declines to give her name or any other details that might identify her.

Just how much the movement has polarised Dresden, Ulrich Wolf can testify. Having worked as a reporter with the Sächsische Zeitung for 11 years, he has spent the last 12 months focussing almost solely on Pegida. He has received plenty of hate mail and threats and even had to block friends from his Twitter account. An entire wall in his office is taken up with a chart detailing the Pegida kingpins, and their various connections to far-right groupings around Europe.

“A year in, the topic of Pegida has crept into every family, every workplace, every sports club, you name it, like a poison. The main question being asked is are you for or against it?” he says, over lunch in his newspaper’s canteen. “If it’s a Monday, it’s raining and you’re riding the tram, you can’t help but ask whether the person sitting opposite you is going to the rally.”

He defines the protesters as the “verbitterte Mitte”, the embittered centre, who lost their sense of “Heimat”, or belonging, when communism collapsed and have never found it again. Many, he says, work in the service industry, often in call centres or logistics firms, on low wages, which only adds to their sense of humiliation.

“This region is something of a low-wage test lab. People are often not represented by a trade union. Neither do they belong to a church. They’ve seen industry around them collapse, the local fire brigade is no longer financed,” Wolf says.

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For many their strongest sense of belonging until now came from the football club Dynamo Dresden. Many of Pegida’s rallying cries, such as “liar press”, were heard in the stands there long before the Monday demonstrations began.

Had the refugee situation not exploded as it has, Wolf strongly believes the organisation might have died a death. “But instead it has had a lot of oil added to its flames,” he says. While some were put off by Bachmann’s Hitler impersonation, most now brush the incident off, saying it was indicative of the way the group is victimised by the media.

Since the early rallies, which consisted of little more than a caravan, a microphone, and a few muffled speakers, the events have grown in stature and sophistication. Now the sound system is loud and clear, the event is live-streamed to about 15,000 people, and Bachmann’s language has changed. He started off talking of “asylum seekers”, which became “asylum spongers”, and now he is frequently heard saying “invaders”. In the same breath he will often talk of criminals and rapists. “He moves in steps,” Wolf notes.

Bachmann is under criminal investigation for his inflammatory language and last week came under fire for putting on stage the German-Turkish author Akif Pirinçci who said it was a shame that “concentration camps are no longer in operation”. The week before, a man turned up with a mock gallows from which hung a noose reserved for Merkel. He is also under criminal investigation.

“Both of those went too far for me,” says the woman pushing her bike. “Though the gallows was only small. No one would have noticed it had it not been put on the internet.” Asked why she continues to come to the rallies, she replies: “Because something’s got to be done.” Her husband joins in the cries of “Widerstand!” and she nestles her head on his shoulder.

But as it has evolved, the Pegida rhetoric has been increasingly blamed for stoking anti-immigrant sentiment across the country, including goading into action those behind the hundreds of arson attacks that have taken place on asylum seekers’ homes this year.

The justice minister, Heiko Maas, was quick to make the connection following the race-motivated stabbing of Cologne mayoral candidate Henriette Reker 10 days ago, when he said: “There’s no excusing those who choose to follow gallows and Hitler moustaches. Pegida is sowing the hate that leads to violence.”

While the tourist office says numbers of visitors to Dresden are down considerably owing to Pegida and the universities and business leaders talk of academics and foreign investors being put off, there is much fulminating over how the city should deal with the group. An online campaign called #IchBinDresden (I am Dresden) has been launched, with figureheads declaring: “I am one of more than 500,000 Dresdeners who don’t go to Pegida. But so far it has had little effect.

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“We are at a loss to find the right recipe to effectively oppose Pegida,” Silvio Lang, spokesman of the association “Nazi Free Dresden” admits. He was among those who criticised the mayor, Dirk Hilbert, for going on holiday rather than joining a counter-demonstration on Pegida’s first birthday.

Timo Lochocki, an analyst of European populism and fellow at the German Marshall Fund thinktank, says Pegida’s presence had been sharpened by the fact that its political goals have become far more clearly defined since the refugee crisis took off.

“The supporters feel that there’s no conservative party any more, that their nation is being sold out, either to the EU or to migrants. An anti-establishment feeling is growing, with a sense of ‘them up there’ doing what they want, while those down below feel they’re increasingly losing control,” he says.

He adds it is only necessary to consider how radically Germany has changed over the past 20 years to understand the sentiments. “It’s far more open, more European, more multicultural, and within just a matter of weeks Germany has thrown its migration politics of decades out the window. The psychological impact this is having on people is completely understandable.”

The next six months will be crucial, Lochocki says. “If the government can give people the feeling they are in control again, that those who should protect them are doing so, that might take the wind out of the sails of the protest. But I do not believe the far right is strong enough to turn this to their advantage.”

Klein, the opera-goer, says she and her daughter are among many Dresdeners to have fallen out over Pegida.

“She got a babysitter tonight and as far as I know is in that crowd with her whistle and flag,” she says before going inside the opera house to take her seat in the stalls.